Weather lessons, electronic eyepieces and finding stuff

Preface: A Messier Marathon is an event held near the end of March, the one time of the year when you can actually see all the Messier objects in a single night. There are 110 Messier objects and a handy way to learn about them all - or any particular one - is to go to the SEDS site - which is where I grabbed this neat graphic. (The charts in this post were all developed from screen shots of Starry Nights software.)

The club has been planning a full night of observing – a Messier Marathon – but the weather isn’t cooperating and last night was particularly frustrating, but for me held some lessons, to wit:

1. Look at the weather forecast from all the good sources – but in the end, look at the sky. Few forecasts are absolutely reliable.
2. The Meade Electronic Eyepiece has very limited use which is why, I suspect, they have been dumping them on the market for $40 and including them as sugar-coating for telescope packages.
3. I enjoy the Celestron 102, but the Orion 80mm ED is a better choice, though I am sorely tempted to try a 100mm ED if I can find one at a good price.
4. Red dot finder and zoom eyepiece make a great combination, but finder charts with these tools in mind help. I firmed up my own quick finding guides for M11, 3, 51. 10 and 12.

Ok - back to the Marathon. First, if I were responsible for making the go, no-go decision for a dozen or more people planning to spend a full night observing, I would have called the Messier Marathon off last night based on conditions and all forecasts at 4 pm. And that's what the person in charge did. But at 8 pm I looked out and it was clear. And while it clouded some around 9, I am told it was clear a couple hours later. It was also clear when I got up at 4 am. So much for forecast. They are helpful, but you have to use your own judgment and your eyes, if you're going to enjoy this hobby to the utmost.

Anyway, given the clear skies and a commitment to help out at a school program Tuesday night, I decided to test the "electronic eyepiece" again, this time on the moon in the 80mm F5 "StarSeeker." The drive and "go to" on this scope have impressed me so far and once more it did well on a simple "solar system" align where I pointed it at the moon – told it that was what it was seeing – and the drive kept it in view for the next hour.

But the view on the video screen was poor. First, even though this was just an 80mm and the moon just five days old, it was washed out and the one control on the electronic eyepiece did not help. I finally screwed in a moon filter, which dimmed the light enough to get an acceptable image.

But the difference between what could be seen on the screen and what you saw if you put in a normal, low-powered eyepiece, was dramatic. The normal view won hands down. The video view was soft and low contrast and didn’t reveal nearly as much detail, even though it magnified significantly – or maybe in part because it magnified significantly. It also had a very small field of view – about one-quarter a degree, and this with a focal length of 400mm on the scope!

So is this camera of any use? Maybe on the sun. I have yet to seriously evaluate it that way. Aside from that it would have minimal educational use in that you could talk about the image on screen before and after students had looked in the telescope. That's helpful, but it would be more helpful if the image took in the entire moon. (Hmmmm. . . wonder if I can screw in the foal reducer from the MallinCam?)

My enjoyment of the Celestron 102 on the p-mount and me in the astro-chair continues – though I have to admit, the 80 ED is a better all around choice. My target this morning was another old friend, M11, the Wild Duck Cluster and I was out and observing by about 4:30 am. Now this cluster has never really looked like a flock of wild ducks to me – but I usually view it in a larger scope. In the 15-inch it looks like you’re flying over a well-planned city at night – or perhaps a computer chip. There's a single bright star in the middle and lots of other stars somewhat evenly-spaced and all about the same brightness.

In the 102mm at low power it's a triangular blur with the center bright. As you zoom in you pick up individual stars turning off and on like a flock of small birds, flying in the distance and suddenly shifting their direction. Hmmm. . . maybe that's the wild duck rationale? But it's not a V like a flight of geese - and if anything, it brought to mind a Christmas tree for me.

But again, I am really enjoying the zoom and took my time this morning experimenting with viewing the cluster on different powers and with different framing. Delightful. Even more delightful is trying to imagine being on a planet around a star in such a cluster – how brilliant the night sky would be!

I found M11 easily from memory, but I still made note of a simple arc of three stars starting with Altair and moving south that make it easy to find the way.

Oh - one key to using a red dot finder successfully? Keep both eyes open. It says this int he instruction to one of mine, but who reads instructions? Anyway -for some reason I read these instructions and guess what - this really helps!

After this I went on to M3 – anther old friend and also a pesky one to find because it lies in an area of sky with few bright stars. My method is to draw a mental line from Arcturus to Cor Caroli. M3 is just shy of the halfway point on this line. (Alkaid – the last star in the handle of the Big Dipper – forms a nice triangle with Cor Caroli and Arcturus.)

M3 lies within it's own triangle of nearby bright stars and is another wonderful globular cluster that rivals M13.

Having gone to a couple of relatively nearby star cities –M11 includes about 1,000 stars some 6,000 light years away and M3 is maybe half a million stars about 40,000 light years away – I moved out to a whole new world – the colliding galaxies known as M51, or "the Whirlpool." To find this I usually go to Alkaid and start sweep in the general direction of Cor Caroli. Not far, though, for M51 is just a bit more than three degrees from Alkaid and makes a rough triangle with Mizar.

In contrast to M11 and M3, with M51 we're talking about more than 100 billion stars and they are just two faint smudges, detectable at 21X and clearly visible at about 60X. But you need a lot of imagination because they are at least 15million light years away and maybe 40 million. Needless to say distances when they are this great are frequently debatable. This showed up more clearly than it did for me the other morning, but this really needs the 1`5-inch, or the video camera on the 8-inch – to start to look like the two intertwined galaxies we know it is.

Enroute to M51 I stopped by Cor Caroli and once more the companion star in this easily-split double strikes me as a definite violet.

Noticing Ophiuchus and Hydra in the south, I decided to look for M10 and M12. I knew their location roughly, but I got out the Sky and Telescope's new Pocket Star Atlas to check. What always strikes me in this section of sky are the two wide pairs of stars in a line – and they are my starting point. The first and wider pair is up in the serpent's head- the upper right in the chart above. The second pair is about 10 degrees – one fist – to the southeast,
Fousing on this second pair, I move on up from Delta Ophichus to Lambda Ophiuchus. These form a nice triangle with M12. M 10 is just a simple slide eastward and a bit south. Having said that, I did find the two easily with a combination of red dot and low power – but the dawn had overtaken me. They were all washed out in the growing light – besides, my hands were cold. ;-)